Research in Motion (RIM), the company makes the line of popular BlackBerry cell phones and smart phones, is ripping a page out of the iPhone playbook and adding applications and an application store to its phones.

RIM is expected to make the announcement of the app store, to be called App World on April 1. Similar to the iPhone, it will allow users to download and use a variety of third-party developed applications on the phone.

Initial reports say that most App World applications will be either free or $2.99. RIM has promised developers that they’ll make a greater profit than they will with iPhone apps, hoping to spur development on the BlackBerry platform instead.

The main danger to this, as I see it, is that most iPhone apps that aren’t free cost around one dollar. That’s about a third of the price of the average BlackBerry app, and users might not want to shell out three dollars per app. On the other hand, BlackBerries are normally used in corporations, and those users often are more affluent than the typical cell phone owner, so the premium price may not be a problem.

In any case, I’m a fan of competition among gadgets, so this entry is a good thing.